"Oh, she’ll be somewhere else by then. That’s easy."
"Five billion years. The Milky Way collides with the Andromeda Galaxy and the whole neighborhood is full of high-energy radiation and exploding stars."
"That’s trickier. She’s going to have to either prevent that or move a few million light-years away to a friendlier galaxy. But she’ll have time enough to prepare and to assemble the tools. I have faith that she’ll prove equal to the task."
"One trillion years. The last stars gutter out. Only black holes remain."
"Black holes are a terrific source of energy. No problem."
"One-point-six googol years."
"Googol?"
"That’s ten raised to the hundredth power—one followed by a hundred zeros. The heat-death of the universe. How does she survive it?"
"She’ll have seen it coming for a long time," the mech said. "When the last black holes dissolve, she’ll have to do without a source of free energy. Maybe she could take and rewrite her personality into the physical constants of the dying universe. Would that be possible?"
"Oh, perhaps. But I really think that the lifetime of the universe is long enough for anyone," the granddaughter said. "Mustn’t get greedy."
"Maybe so," the old man said thoughtfully. "Maybe so." Then, to the mech, "Well, there you have it: a glimpse into the future, and a brief biography of the first immortal, ending, alas, with her death. Now tell me. Knowing that you contributed something, however small, to that accomplishment—wouldn’t that be enough?"
"No," Jack said. "No, it wouldn’t."
Brandt made a face. "Well, you’re young. Let me ask you this: Has it been a good life so far? All in all?"
"Not that good. Not good enough."
For a long moment, the old man was silent. Then, "Thank you," he said. "I valued our conversation." The interest went out of his eyes and he looked away.
Uncertainly, Jack looked at the granddaughter, who smiled and shrugged. "He’s like that," she said apologetically. "He’s old. His enthusiasms wax and wane with his chemical balances. I hope you don’t mind."
"I see." The young man stood. Hesitantly, he made his way to the door.
At the door, he glanced back and saw the granddaughter tearing her linen napkin into little bits and eating the shreds, delicately washing them down with sips of wine.
(1998)
BEACHCOMBER
Mike Resnick
Michael Diamond Resnick, born 1942, a native of Chicago, is a prolific writer and editor who began his genre career with an Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, The Forgotten Sea of Mars (1965). His wife, Carol L. Cain, is uncredited collaborator on much of his science fiction, which is hardly surprising, given how much there is of it: around 75 novels (at the last count), nearly 300 stories, three screenplays, and 42 anthologies. Resnick’s papers – all 125 boxes of them – are in the Special Collections Library of the University of South Florida in Tampa. Resnick has probably sold more humorous stories than any science fiction author except Robert Sheckley, and even the more serious stories (like the one here) are leavened with humour. Resnick has won five Hugos and has been nominated for 36 more.
Arlo didn’t look much like a man. (Not all robots do, you know.) The problem was that he didn’t act all that much like a robot.
The fact of the matter is that one day, right in the middle of work, he decided to pack it in. Just got up, walked out the door, and kept on going. Somebody must have seen him; it’s pretty hard to hide nine hundred pounds of moving parts. But evidently nobody knew it was Arlo. After all, he hadn’t left his desk since the day they’d activated him twelve years ago.
So the Company got in touch with me, which is a euphemistic way of saying that they woke me in the middle of the night, gave me three minutes to get dressed, and rushed me to the office. I can’t really say that I blame them: when you need a scapegoat, the Chief of Security is a pretty handy guy to have around.
Anyway, it was panic time. It seems that no robot ever ran away before. And Arlo wasn’t just any robot: he was a twelve million dollar item, with just about every feature a machine could have short of white-walled tires. And I wasn’t even so certain about the tires; he sure dropped out of sight fast enough.
So, after groveling a little and making all kinds of optimistic promises to the Board, I started doing a little checking up on Arlo. I went to his designer, and his department head, and even spoke to some of his co-workers, both human and robot.
And it turned out that what Arlo did was sell tickets. That didn’t sound like twelve million dollars’ worth of robot to me, but I was soon shown the error of my ways. Arlo was a travel agent supreme. He booked tours of the Solar System, got his people into and out of luxury hotels on Ganymede and Titan and the Moon, scheduled their weight and their time to the nearest gram and the nearest second.
It still didn’t sound that impressive. Computers were doing stuff like that long before robots ever crawled out of the pages of pulp magazines and into our lives.
"True," said his department head. "But Arlo was a robot with a difference. He booked more tours and arranged more complicated logistical scheduling than any other ten robots put together."
"More complex thinking gear?" I asked.
"Well, that too," was the answer. "But we did a little something else with Arlo that had never been done before."
"And what was that?"
"We programmed him for enthusiasm."
"That’s something special?" I asked.
"Absolutely. When Arlo spoke about the beauties of Callisto, or the fantastic light refraction images on Venus, he did so with a conviction that was so intense as to be almost tangible. Even his voice reflected his enthusiasm. He was one of those rare robots who was capable of modular inflection, rather than the dull, mechanistic monotone so many of them possess. He literally loved those desolate worlds, and his record will show that his attitude was infectious."
I thought about that for a minute. "So you’re telling me that you’ve created a robot whose entire motivation had been to send people out to sample all these worlds, and he’s been crated up in an office twenty-four hours a day since the second you plugged him in?"
"That’s correct."
"Did it ever occur to you that maybe he wanted to see some of these sights himself?"
"It’s entirely possible that he did, but leaving his post would be contrary to his orders."
"Yeah," I said. "Well, sometimes a little enthusiasm can go a long way."
He denied it vigorously, and I spent just enough time in his office to mollify him. Then I left and got down to work. I checked every outgoing space flight, and had some of the Company’s field reps hit the more luxurious vacation spas. He wasn’t there.
So I tried a little closer to home: Monte Carlo, New Vegas, Alpine City. No luck. I even tried a couple of local theaters that specialized in Tri-Fi travelogs.
You know where I finally found him?
Stuck in the sand at Coney Island. I guess he’d been walking along the beach at night and the tide had come in and he just sank in, all nine hundred pounds of him. Some kids had painted some obscene graffiti on his back, and there he stood, surrounded by empty beer cans and broken glass and a few dead fish. I looked at him for a minute, then shook my head and walked over.
"I knew you’d find me sooner or later," he said, and even though I knew what to expect, I still did a double-take at the sound of that horribly unhappy voice coming from this enormous mass of gears and gadgetry.